


the inevitable landslide

by cosmicwoosan



Series: the sun will rise [3]
Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: Crying, Depression, Eating Disorders, Emotional Manipulation, Family Issues, Heavy Angst, Implied/Referenced Prostitution, Implied/Referenced Underage Sex, M/M, Nihilism, Physical Abuse, Sad Ending, Suicidal Thoughts, Suicide, Underage Smoking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Verbal Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:27:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23922322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmicwoosan/pseuds/cosmicwoosan
Summary: San and Wooyoung were unlovable to everyone except other, two long lost souls that yearned to be everything but alive, brought together by false hope and futile wishes that inevitably led to their descent into the sea.-in which Wooyoung wanted to be skin and bones and San wanted to be dead. Together, they buried themselves.
Relationships: Choi San/Jung Wooyoung
Series: the sun will rise [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1567120
Comments: 10
Kudos: 116





	the inevitable landslide

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. Athena here. Before you read, there are a few points that I'd like to make.
> 
> -This is a direct prequel/spin-off of my fic 'an ethereal abyss' and includes numerous references to events in that story. I highly suggest you read it if you haven't already before reading this one.  
> -There might be a few plot holes or details that are a bit off, but they're mostly small things. I actually went back to AEA and changed some of the smaller details. For example, in AEA, I'd written that San and Wooyoung grew up together from childhood, but in this case, it was from middle school.  
> -San and Wooyoung's relationship is extremely toxic. I'm sure it's quite obvious, but I would also like to point out that it is written in a way that some may see as romanticized. This was done purposely. I do not intend to glorify or romanticize suffering in any way, but here's the reality: some people who are suffering will romanticize their own suffering as a way to cope. It may make the suffering more bearable for them, but as I state many times, it doesn't go away because nothing is truly done to help it. You'll see by the end of this fic why the romanticization of pain and suffering doesn't bode well.  
> -I don't have any experience with eating disorders, and I have only known one person in passing who has had one. I apologize if Wooyoung's ED is portrayed in an inaccurate way or may be considered offensive (I personally don't think it is but I apologize nonetheless). It isn't really elaborated on nor are there are there any graphic scenes regarding it; it's mostly describing the deterioration of his appearance.  
> -I wrote AEA before I understood the school year in sk, but in the grand scheme of things, when these events occur doesn't really matter. AEA takes place in the early-late fall, where there is still school, so at least that part lines up. Please excuse the ignorance on my part.  
> -Please please please pay attention to tags for trigger warnings. I tried to include everything, but if there's a tag that you think should be added, please let me know.  
> -San, Wooyoung, and Yeosang are all 18 in Korean age (17 internationally), so yes, they are underage. Hongjoong's age is still 20 in Korean age (19 internationally). Because of this, I went back to AEA and added the underage tag, but there are no explicit underage scenes in this fic, though underage sex is implied.

San was obsessed with the word ‘star’ as a child. He couldn’t remember how old he was when he learned the word, but maybe it was always there. Maybe his mother sang him a nursery rhyme that had the word in it, as many songs did, nursery rhyme or not. Either way, the word always fascinated him, as did the stars themselves.

He couldn’t remember how old he was when his mother showed him the stars that glittered across the night sky. She explained that there were things called ‘constellations,’ clusters and patterns of stars that always appeared the same because that was how they were arranged. That was how they were always meant to appear. She told him that as the world changed and moved with time as its guide, the stars aligned themselves in unique patterns and drew one’s fate.

How cruel, San thought, that it was up to dots in the sky to decide one’s future.

San was eleven when he learned in school that stars were just spheres of plasma and that the only star present in the solar system is the sun. That one nursery rhyme’s question always had an answer, one explained by science, but the song itself left the answer up to the children’s interpretations. Parents and teachers let kids sing it because perhaps they wanted their imaginations to run wild, to allow their children to imagine what stars are because they’re beautiful and almost magical to look at. If kids learned that stars were just astronomical objects consisting of plasma and gases, the wonder would be gone.

San also learned that just like everything else, stars have an end. They die. But he also learned that from their deaths come more elements that have the potential to create new stars.

He felt betrayed after he learned that stars weren’t so special after all. He wouldn’t go as far as to say his mother had lied to him, though. She simply wanted him to have the same outlook as other children. She wanted him to sing songs with childlike innocence and use his imagination to create.

The more knowledge that San acquired through school, the more his mind disintegrated. By middle school, he himself was ready to disintegrate. Plagued by constant thoughts of death, he found himself wondering if he, like a star, would have the potential to create new life after he died.

He knew this wasn’t normal. It wasn’t normal for a middle school student to wonder about death. He wasn’t suicidal, at least, he didn’t _think_ he was, but he knew he shouldn’t be thinking about such a thing at such a young age. He was supposed to be thinking about the girls in his class and what he was going to have for dinner. He was supposed to be thinking about homework and extracurricular activities. Hell, some of his classmates were thinking about college already.

San never thought about any of that. Instead, he thought about what it would be like to die and be a star.

-

San was thirteen when his father first laid a hand on him.

He’d been in his bedroom while the sun was setting, pen furiously scribbling words of nonsense in his notebook because school was running him dry and he couldn’t stop thinking about dying. His grades had been slipping, and he was well aware of that, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. However, just like any parent, his father wanted ‘the best’ for him.

So, his father barged into his room with his report card clutched in his overbearing fist and demanded why his grades were so abysmal. He’d heard his father’s voice like this in the past, usually when he was yelling at his mother for something stupid, or before his sister moved out and he would yell at her too for whatever reason. His father had never yelled at him, though.

San wanted to ask him, “Well, how would your grades be if all you could think about was death?”

Instead, he bit his lip and averted his eyes, opting for silence. With a deep breath, his father towered over him, grabbed a fistful of his hair, and slapped him across the face, just off to the side of his eye. San reeled from the impact, immediately feeling the sting and the watering of his eyes, but they weren’t tears. They couldn’t be tears.

“Get your grades up or it’ll be worse next time.”

His father stormed out while he blinked the waterworks away, rubbing the area as his blood cells rushed to the scene to heal whatever was left behind underneath his skin. A bruise, perhaps. It certainly felt like it would leave a bruise.

The thing is, it did leave a bruise. Just in a different location.

-

The next day, San met Jung Wooyoung.

He’d been left with a red mark instead of a fully bloomed bruise. He took it to school with him, and during lunchtime, he sat alone like he always did until a semi-familiar face sat across from him. Glancing up with a scowl, he was met with the face of a boy in his history class, whose name he couldn’t remember. As he glanced around for any other tables for him to sit at, he realized that there weren’t any.

“I’m sorry,” the boy said meekly. “There just… weren’t any other places to sit. I won’t bother you, I promise.” He proceeded to unpack his lunch, which only consisted of a tin of rice. Nothing else to go along with it.

San kept his head down but eyes up, watching as the boy ate minuscule bites from the tin, chewing slowly. He too kept his head down, almost shamefully.

“My name is San.”

The boy jumped slightly at San’s sudden introduction. “Oh. Y-Yeah, I know. You’re in my history class.”

And San would be lying if he said he didn’t feel a bit happy knowing somebody knew his name. “What’s yours?”

“Wooyoung. Jung Wooyoung.”

Right. The name was familiar now. San nodded, lowering his head again and staring at the table. He hadn’t bothered packing a meal, nor did he feel like getting up to buy one. His stomach felt so full yet so empty at the same time. It hurt either way, so he didn’t bother.

“Um, you can have some, i-if you want,” Wooyoung said suddenly, sliding the tin in San’s direction. He did it slowly, just like he ate, and placed the chopsticks on the side. “I’m not that hungry, s-so you can have the rest if you want, actually.”

San eyed the tin as if it held poison while Wooyoung’s eyes were caught between looking and not looking. He was so _small_ , San noticed, almost adorably so. He looked kind of sad too, just like him. With the faintest of smiles, San took the tin and the chopsticks and ate half of Wooyoung’s rice in silence while the other boy watched.

“I’m sorry,” Wooyoung said again.

“Why are you sorry?” San swallowed his last bite, leaving a little less than half of the rice left, and slid it back to Wooyoung.

“For bothering you.”

“You didn’t bother me,” San reassured, placing the chopsticks on the tin’s rim. “After all, you didn’t really say anything.

Wooyoung’s cheeks flushed several shades of pink before San just chuckled and stood up. Lunchtime was nearly over anyway. “Thank you for giving me some of your food,” San said, reaching his hand out. Wooyoung hesitantly shook it, his bony fingers feeling like the chopsticks he’d just held, and did his best to smile. “Eat the rest of it though, okay?”

Wooyoung nodded wordlessly as San walked away.

His stomach still hurt. He was neither full nor hungry, and the way he saw it, his stomach was definitely half empty.

However, his heart was full, and he couldn’t erase Wooyoung’s chubby cheeks and shades of red from his head. He looked so frail, San noticed, but he was adorable. It was daunting, how cold and dry and _small_ his hand had been, but it made San’s feel warm.

It was the most San had felt in a while, and for once, his brain was filled with images of a fragile-looking boy instead of thoughts of what lies beyond.

He finished his homework that night while his parents slept soundly and wondered if Wooyoung finished his tin of rice.

-

San managed to get his grades up past average with fear as his motivation. Even as the spot next to his eye healed, the mental image of it never did. The internal bruise remained. It made San’s lip quiver at night, but he refused to cry because he imagined what his father would do if he did. So he let his lip tremble but nothing more. He let the nightmares torment him because there wasn’t anything else he could do to quell his mind. All the while, his parents didn’t say a word to him.

Every day, he wanted to tell his mother. “Eomma, he hit me,” he wanted to say. But the words were always swallowed up by that same fear, that it would happen again, because San believed it. He believed it would happen again. There was nothing stopping his father from hurting him. He knew his mother would be powerless to stop it, just like him. So he ate his meals and did his homework and did his best not to choke on his own unspoken words at night.

Some nights, he thought it would be better if he did choke.

After the day in the cafeteria, San began to notice Wooyoung. Maybe that’s how it is sometimes; people are invisible until they make themselves visible, and Wooyoung, though perhaps unintentional, made himself present in San’s eyes. Wooyoung never spared him any glances during history class, never sat across from him in the cafeteria, but San _knew_ him now, and whenever San saw him, he couldn’t help but smile a little.

So San took the first step and reintroduced himself to Wooyoung when he found the boy sitting outside on some bleachers during lunchtime, a book perched in his lap with no tin of rice in sight. Wooyoung nearly jumped out of his skin as soon as San took a seat beside him. “Hey,” San greeted him coolly.

“H-Hi. Um, San, right?”

“Yeah. Just call me that, no ending or anything. I don’t care about all that,” San said. “Do you mind if I just call you Wooyoung?”

“That’s okay, yeah.” Wooyoung looked about ready to throw up.

“You don’t need to be scared of me, Wooyoung,” San said, perhaps a little forward, but if he was reading Wooyoung right, then maybe they were in the same boat and maybe he would understand.

There were plenty of reasons to be scared, but none to be scared of each other.

“I-I’m sorry. I just, um, don’t really talk to anybody,” Wooyoung responded, fingers toying with the edges of his book. It was as if his entire body was a tree being stirred by the slightest breeze, so thin and malleable, but he was still striking to San. He stood out, and San couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.

“I don’t either, if you couldn’t tell from that one day I was sitting alone at lunch,” San said lightheartedly.

“Oh.”

“How are you doing?” San asked, a question that always had the same answer to him, but no one’s ever asked him that.

His parents never sat down with him at the dinner table and asked how he was he doing. It was always “how was school?” It was always “are you keeping your grades up?” Because those were the questions that mattered, the latter more so than the former, because the way San saw it, his parents couldn’t give less of a shit about how his day was at school. They simply asked that question to make conversation, to make _themselves_ feel like good parents because they were at least trying. At least they asked a question that barely resembled “how are you doing?”

San would always answer with “good” because it was the easiest answer to the question that got his parents off his back the quickest. He would then retreat back to his room where he thought about death and what would happen afterward.

If he ever did tell his parents, they would call him selfish. How _dare_ he think about death when they worked so hard to bring him to life. His father would probably smack him across the face again and tell him to get over it. To work harder at school, get a good job, and _maybe_ he would snap out of it. San, at his age, didn’t know if he would believe it or not. Yes, he was still young, and he was well aware of that, but it didn’t stop him from thinking.

Perhaps he was thinking too much, but he just couldn’t stop.

Looking at Wooyoung curiously, he wondered if the other boy’s parents asked him how he was doing. He wondered if Wooyoung’s parents ever hit him like his father did. He wondered if Wooyoung was sad or happy or something in between. If he was just like any other student, studying hard and doing what his parents wanted him to do because he was still reliant on them. If he ever thought about death too.

Wooyoung shrugged and gave him a dubious look. “I’m okay, I guess.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” San asked.

Wooyoung blinked at him, frowning. “Why do you care?” The question came off a bit harsh and offhanded, but understandably so. San could only assume what Wooyoung was feeling. The thing is, San was still a stranger, asking him a loaded question that he was probably quite unprepared for.

San wondered, in that moment, if he truly did care, but he was honest with his answer.

“Whether I care or not, does it really matter? Whatever it is, you can talk about it. I’m sure you have a lot going on in your mind right now. I do too.”

Wooyoung looked away, lips pressed in a thin line. San noticed the way his shoulders rose and fell with every small breath he took. His fingers barely poked through the buttoned-up sleeves of his uniform. He was huddled in on himself, visibly uncomfortable, but he didn’t get up and leave. He clung onto his book and the words he wanted to say.

“I just…” He trailed off, eyes falling to the dying grass. “I wish things were different sometimes.”

San nodded and watched him breathe. He was so fucking _small._ It wasn’t the kind of small that was endearing, where people would want to ruffle his hair or tuck him into their pocket. It was the scary kind of small that made San worry. As adorable as Wooyoung’s chubby cheeks and shy demeanor were, his small frame would make him an easy target. If anybody were to hit him, the bruises would look like endless dark pits.

The mark on San’s face would look ten times worse on Wooyoung.

San could have said a lot of things in that particular moment. At this point, he knew things would probably be different if he just stopped thinking about death. He knew things would probably be _better_ , too. But he also knew that wishing for something was futile. Shooting stars can’t reverse fate, can’t rearrange the stars that have already passed, no matter how many times one wishes upon them.

Things wouldn’t be different. It’s impossible.

So San didn’t say “me too,” because that answer would be untrue. Wishing was pointless. People could wish all they want, but nothing comes from it. A wish is just a wish, a meaningless plea to an inconceivable force that nine times out of ten aren’t granted. No, people have to make those things happen for themselves.

Except San was past that point.

His father had already hit him. Nothing was going to change that.

So instead, he told Wooyoung, “Then I wish the same for you.”

And maybe that was the truth. San felt like he was long gone, but maybe Wooyoung wasn’t. Perhaps Wooyoung would be able to dig himself out of whatever hole he was in and grant his own wish. To change. To make things different for him.

As powerless as Wooyoung looked, maybe he held a much stronger resolve than San. Maybe, under an oversized uniform and chapped skin, was the smallest fragment of hope that San knew he needed, but would never seek.

San didn’t ask Wooyoung what he wished was different. He assumed that there were a lot of things. There were a lot of things in San’s life that could have been different if he hadn’t started wondering if death was like that of a star. Maybe his father wouldn’t have hit him. Maybe he wouldn’t be up so late at night thinking of being six feet under. Maybe his grades would be more sufficient and actually get him places.

Maybe, just maybe, he would mean something.

-

San would join Wooyoung at lunch because there was nobody else. He figured it would be nice to have someone to talk to instead entertaining his sort of suicidal thoughts, so whenever and wherever he saw Wooyoung, he would join him. The smaller boy didn’t seem to mind, as wary as he was in the beginning. In fact, Wooyoung seemed to open up to him, smiled a lot more than he used to, and even started bringing more food to school so he could share with San.

They talked about the pros and cons of life. San didn’t tell Wooyoung about his incessant thoughts about the end of it, but he was a drastic change. San was talking to someone besides himself. He considered that an accomplishment.

Wooyoung was something different. San didn’t wish for him, but he supposed life was unpredictable like that. He wondered if Wooyoung saw him as a difference in his life as well, and he wondered if Wooyoung wished for someone like him to come around. If he was one of the things Wooyoung wished was different.

San never invited Wooyoung over. Hell, he never even told his parents about Wooyoung. To his parents’ knowledge, he had a decent amount of acquaintances, but they never questioned his social life. The only thing they questioned was his grades. If he was doing well in school. Because a piece of paper that judges how well a student does on their homework was much more important to them than their own son.

So San only saw Wooyoung at school, that is, until Wooyoung invited him over.

San didn’t know how to go about it. He wasn’t a typical child who had friends and attended grand birthday parties with games and confetti. He hardly talked to any of his peers growing up unless he was forced into a partnered project. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, San was friendless. He never cared all that much, though. He had his brain and his thoughts and those were enough to entertain him.

Because San panicked, he didn’t tell his parents where he was going after school that particular Friday. He muted his phone and ignored the constant worried texts from his parents, and since they had no clue where he was, they couldn’t pick him up. He stayed with Wooyoung in his bedroom, adorned with posters of his favorite musicians and sticky notes with scribbled daily reminders.

Written on a dry erase board was a calendar, and each box until the present day was marked with numbers. Most numbers ranged from sixty to sixty-five, the outlier being fifty-eight. San eyed the board curiously.

“Sannie!” Wooyoung exclaimed, turning his attention away from the board. “Come look!”

Wooyoung was kneeling over the head of his bed, gazing out the window that overlooked a portion of his backyard. “A deer.” He pointed at the majestic doe, smiling as he did.

“You called me over to look at a deer?” San asked with a smirk.

“I’m entertained easily!” Wooyoung argued back playfully, headbutting San’s shoulder, only to rest his head on it shortly after. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

The short answer was no, he didn’t. He didn’t really believe in anything in any sense. He was far past the point of believing in anything anymore. But as much as he didn’t believe in it, he loved the idea of his body becoming a star after death, something that people gazed upon and admired and studied because they were important despite just being astronomical objects made up of a concoction of chemical mush. Stars, on the surface of the sky, were something to be loved. They had countless songs and poems and monologues written about them. They were simple yet complex, distant yet beautiful.

They were everything San never was.

That was the long answer. But because Wooyoung was someone who smiled at deer, whose eyes glimmered with wonder and _hope_ , San forwent the long answer and said, “No, but I think it’s pretty cool.”

“What do you think I’d be in my next life?” Wooyoung asked, turning to him with one of his precious smiles that San never wanted to stop looking at.

“A star,” San answered instantly.

“You think?” Wooyoung’s smile widened, eyes glowing just like those floating orbs of gas San loved.

“Yeah. They’re pretty.”

San knew he’d slipped up as soon as the words were said, but it was too late to retract them. Wooyoung’s plump cheeks were tinted pink, however, some of the blush creeping up to his ears as he looked away from San, but he was still smiling.

“Thanks.”

San didn’t say “you’re welcome.” He just continued to stare out the window at the oblivious deer and wondered what that deer was in its past life.

-

San was on thin ice with his parents.

His grades were satisfactory, good enough to get them off his back, but as soon as he returned home from Wooyoung’s, unsurprisingly, they stood at the entryway, his father in front of his mother with a much more stern face.

He was struck again, this time, a lot harder than the first.

“Where the hell were you?” his father boomed, hand raised as if he would hit him again.

San was on thin ice _himself._ He was so goddamn tired. Fear was what ran through his veins most of the time because he didn’t want to be hit again. That was why he got his grades up, why he didn’t talk to his parents whenever he could get away with it.

But now, as much as San could still feel the sting from the previous strike on top of this one, the fear was slowly slipping away.

“What does it matter?” he found himself muttering.

“Excuse me?” His father’s tone grew increasingly aggressive, which wasn’t a surprise in the slightest, but San didn’t flinch. He kept his eyes averted to the side as his father continued, “We were worried _sick_ about you, and you have the audacity to ask ‘what does it matter?’”

San said nothing.

“Look at me when I’m talking to you!”

There was a hand in his hair and another across his face _again._ Tears in San’s eyes surfaced as a bodily reflex, but god forbid he let them fall. He breathed, his chest rising and falling, and stood firmly as his father glared daggers into him, but he didn’t once look into his father’s eyes because he was afraid he would see himself.

To think he, an abomination, had come from another abomination. It was an amusing thought, one that he dared laugh at in that moment. “What’s so funny?” his father demanded, grip tightening in his son’s hair.

“Please, honey, stop,” his mother pleaded, approaching him from behind with her arms barely stretched out. She rested her dainty fingers on her husband’s shoulder and nudged him backwards carefully.

“If you’re so _worried_ about me, why are you hitting me?” San asked, voice devoid of any inflection or tone.

He was so, so tired.

And finally, his father relented the grasp on his hair with a shove of the head that knocked San’s brain around in his skull. “San-ah,” his mother said as his father stormed off somewhere in the house. “Just… go to your room. We will talk about this tomorrow.”

San didn’t say anything as he stomped upstairs, slamming the door to his bedroom behind him. The pain of the slaps were starting to settle in, the tears threatening to pour out, and while San’s lip quivered, he simply wiped the tears from his eyes and sat down on his bed. When he blinked, it hurt. His head was reeling, his brain and skull felt like unnecessary weights that he wished he could just rip out because _that_ would be an interesting way to die.

Then, he found himself smiling spitefully as his father’s words played on a loop, the _“we were worried_ sick _about you, and you have the audacity to ask ‘what does it matter?’”_ Because really, how ironic is it, that his father would be worried about him being gone but not worried about the pain? Was his father blind? Idiotic?

San figured he must have inherited some of his father’s traits. No, San would not want to hit or hurt anybody. He would not want anybody to feel this pain, both the sting from the strikes and the internal suffering. But in his eyes, perhaps his father had no idea how to _talk._ Where San took it out on himself in the form of restless nights, his father took it out on his own child.

He laughed. How tragic, he thought. He wondered if his father expected him to be some sort of prodigy as soon as he was born. He wondered if his father named him after a mountain because he believed his son would be strong, resistant to all the adversities in life, and San couldn’t help but laugh at it all because he was the complete opposite. If he was a mountain, he wanted nothing more than to crumble and sink beneath the sea and never rise again.

And as San had predicted, they didn’t talk about it the next day.

-

At one point, San’s parents must have realized that he was a lost cause. There were nights where he didn’t come home until past ten, but they would turn a blind eye to it now that they realized their son was hopeless. In a way, San was glad. He was able to see Wooyoung whenever he could, whenever Wooyoung’s parents allowed it. San was surprised that Wooyoung’s parents never asked him about his own, but even if they did, San would have absolutely nothing to say about them.

Wooyoung, on the other hand, did.

San supposed he would have to tell him one day. Wooyoung approached the question carefully; rather than asking, “what are your parents like?” he asked, “When will I be able to see _your_ house?”

“Probably never,” San answered coldly.

Wooyoung was silent for several seconds, probably conjuring up another question that didn’t directly imply that his father was the one giving him the noticeable marks on his face. San knew Wooyoung wasn’t blind or stupid like his father, but he also knew how hard it was to _talk._ If Wooyoung asked, he would answer, but for the question to be asked, sometimes drastic things have to happen.

When San went to Wooyoung’s house with a much more severe bruise on his cheek, Wooyoung finally asked.

“San, what happened?” He’d asked it in such a small voice, one that trembled with fear, like he would cry.

“My father hits me sometimes,” San answered in quite the opposite voice. He’d grown cold, almost numb to his father’s attacks. His father could pummel him into the corner of his room and he wouldn’t shed a tear. To his surprise, it hadn’t happened yet, but he awaited the day that it would, when the stars aligned in all the right ways for his father to snap entirely, to beat his son into complete submission, but even then, San felt like he wouldn’t mind all that much.

“San…”

San witnessed Wooyoung cry for the first time that night. He bit into his pillow to contain his sobs just in case his parents heard him, but his entire face was blotched red, shoulders quaking and body curled in on itself. He couldn’t even _look_ at San.

“I’m sorry, San,” Wooyoung whimpered once he could finally catch his breath.

“There’s nothing to apologize for.”

“I… I’m just sorry this happens to you,” Wooyoung said.

San shrugged and shuffled closer to his friend, enclosing him in a shaky embrace. “There’s no use in apologizing, Wooyoung. There’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s okay. If anything, _you’re_ the one who gives me reasons to look forward to the day. _You_ make me happy. And that’s not something you should apologize for.”

San could speak words of adoration all day. Wooyoung was truly his star, the one that shined brightest whenever the dark sky hovered over his head as a constant reminder that death awaited him. Wooyoung was the reminder that maybe there was hope, maybe one day he would dig himself out of the hole he’d buried himself in. Wooyoung would be the one to guide him to the sunlight and embrace him with flowers and all the beautiful things in life.

San didn’t mind going home to get beaten after a day of seeing Wooyoung. He was pretty damn sure he’d do anything for Wooyoung, anyway.

-

San met Kang Yeosang his first year of high school.

Yeosang had come from a different middle school, so it was safe to say he didn’t have any friends. Not to mention he always had his nose lodged in between the pages of his textbooks rather than trying to build a social life despite being the new kid. He kept to himself and turned a blind eye whenever people whispered good or bad things about the birthmark next to his eye or how he’d probably end up being the teacher’s pet or how quiet he was. San thought those were such stupid things to gossip about.

Yeosang reminded San a lot of Wooyoung, but the thing about Yeosang was that he wasn’t _small._ He seemed to work best alone, not caring about anything else around him besides whatever was in his textbooks. His attitude was aloof and a bit off-putting, which intrigued San. There weren’t many people like Yeosang.

However, after inserting himself into Yeosang’s life, San realized that Yeosang wasn’t as cold as he appeared to be.

Yeosang was incredibly intelligent, and for obvious reasons. He indulged San in his thoughts about the finer details of existence, philosophical tangents that San honestly couldn’t wrap his head around most of the time, but listening to Yeosang talk was mesmerizing. San thought that maybe, if he didn’t think about death so much, he would be like Yeosang.

Yeosang had a lot to say. So did San, but he never said it because his lips had been stitched shut a long time ago. If he were to ever open his mouth, there would be consequences. Therefore, he never told Yeosang that.

San was never nearly as close to Yeosang as he was to Wooyoung, but from the few times they hung out at school, he figured out that Yeosang had a pure heart. He always told San that he didn’t give a shit about trivial things, but he cared deeply about his best friend Jongho, who was still a year below them, because he loved sunsets or whatever. He always told San that if he ever needed anything, to go to him, and he would do his best to help because he didn’t want San to get hurt.

Yeosang never saw the bruises because San’s father didn’t beat him anymore, and the reason for that was because San spent more of his time away from home than not. Whether it was at Wooyoung’s or just wandering around town, San wouldn’t go home until he knew his parents were asleep. All the while, they wouldn’t look for him.

San wondered if they would _ever_ look for him, but he couldn’t care less either way. If anything, maybe he preferred that they didn’t.

He sacrificed his sleep to avoid the bruises because he didn’t want to see Wooyoung cry again. The thoughts that tormented him at night were no longer from fear that his father would hit him again, but rather the thought of Wooyoung hurting over him. San was hurting, yes, but the last thing he wanted to do was share that pain with Wooyoung.

So he took his pain, molded it into the shape of his heart, and locked it away. As much as the thought of Wooyoung crying rattled the cage around his heart, he bit his lip until the tears vanished, and sometimes, he would bleed. He would not cry anymore.

San had always been strong, at least, he liked to think he was. After all, he’d lived this long despite the constant thoughts about dying.

“Yeosang,” San had said as the two sat on the school’s bleachers, watching the soccer team’s practice, “what do you think makes someone strong?”

“Physical, mental, or emotional?” Yeosang asked. Typical of him, of course, thinking of all the possibilities.

“Any.”

As Yeosang pondered the question, the sun dipped behind the trees and spilled harsh yet beautiful colors across the landscape. It was so warm, but it hurt to look at. Perhaps that was true about a lot of things.

“The ability to move along,” Yeosang finally answered, eyes trained on the soccer team, where talented athletes of the highest caliber trained in their natural habitat, doing what they enjoyed because it made them happy, and San found himself a little jealous.

“That could mean a lot of things,” San said.

“Sometimes the vaguest answers hold the most meaning,” Yeosang countered. “It leaves more up to interpretation. Then, the person who asked the question can seek their own answer that caters to themselves rather than the whole. You know what I mean?”

San blinked, a half-second long moment of relief from the sun, and said, “Yeah.”

“There are an infinite amount of questions and an infinite amount of answers to those questions, but for one individual, they only really need to find one answer that works for the questions they ask,” Yeosang continued on, just like the Earth on its axis. “And hopefully, they’ll be satisfied… no, _happy_ with those answers.”

“What if they aren’t happy?”

“Then it’s not the answer.”

It was then that San realized that Yeosang was _good._ Just like Yeosang himself had said, vagueness can sometimes hold the most meaning. In San’s eyes, Yeosang was everything good. He knew ‘good’ is vague, one of the vaguest words in existence, but it was the only word he could come up with describe Yeosang. Every single connotation the word could possess, San found in Yeosang.

That night, San pulled out a piece of old notebook paper at two in the morning, parents sound asleep in the next room over, and wrote:

_Why can’t I stop thinking about dying?_

-

San met Hongjoong in his second to last year of high school.

It was when San was no longer afraid to hold Wooyoung’s hand. It was when Wooyoung had broken into the liquor cabinet at his house and stole them a bottle of whiskey to share. It was when they got drunk enough to leave Wooyoung’s house at eleven at night through his bedroom window and wander the streets until they stumbled over a bridge neither of them knew about and came across a man in a leopard-printed fur coat with blazing red hair and a cigarette between his fingers. He was standing by a curb, head turning as if he were on the lookout for something.

“I think… he’s a hooker,” Wooyoung whispered into San’s ear while leaning onto him for support.

“You think?”

“Or a really washed-up idol.” The idea had both of them snickering as they eyed the mystery man from behind a corner. “We should go talk to him.”

The man had noticed their heads peeking out from behind the brick wall and winked in their direction, maybe some sort of flirtatious sign that San’s inebriated brain didn’t see as such.

In their drunken states, they hobbled towards the man who looked completely unperturbed by their entrance. San could see why Wooyoung thought the man was a prostitute now, with tawdry makeup, a multitude of ear piercings, and the pungent stench of cigarettes and something skunk-like. Despite the previous gesture of interest, he paid no mind to the pair as he smoked his cigarette and gazed out at the empty streets.

“Are you a hooker?” Wooyoung blurted.

“Hey, that’s not a nice question!” San pouted and punched his arm playfully.

The man scoffed and tapped the end of his cigarette. “How old are you two?”

“We’re… shit, how old are we again?” It was safe to say that Wooyoung was beyond his limit at this point.

“We’re, um… second to last year of high school, so… eighteen?” San tried.

“Then you shouldn’t be talking to me. Go home and study.”

San frowned. “Hey, we’re just trying to be nice. Besides, we don’t _want_ to go home. I’m drunk and my parents would probably shove knives in my eyes if I went home like this.”

“Sannie, don’t joke like that, please,” Wooyoung pleaded, resting his head on San’s shoulder but still wobbling on his feet. “Point is, no, we’re not going to go home. Our home lives kinda suck anyway.”

The man made a noise of amusement. “Tell me about it.”

In that moment, San knew what this man meant. But in his hazy state, one that Wooyoung might not remember in the morning, he said, “My father hits me sometimes.”

“Sannie, stooop,” Wooyoung drawled.

Meanwhile, the man finally turned his attention towards him, glaring emerald-colored daggers into his eyes. “I have to wait until, like, two to go home. But, like, it’s okay. How are _you_ , though? How’s soliciting people for sex and money?” San ran his mouth like he was drunk off his ass, but maybe he wasn’t.

“I’m doing just peachy,” the man responded, oddly attentive now. “This line of work definitely has its ups and downs, but I’m managing.”

“It’s not every day you come across a hooker. A _male_ one at that,” Wooyoung commented, though his words were barely strung together coherently.

“I’m the queerest hooker in this part of town, honey. But you’d be surprised at how many important men like to take me up on my… services. Even so, I trust that you two silly teenagers won’t go reporting me, okay? I mean, one of my clients _is_ a cop, so—”

“We won’t tell anyone, promise,” San said. “And hey, we might be teenagers, but you look pretty young to be a hooker.”

“I’m twenty.”

“So barely an adult!” San exclaimed, face brightening for some reason.

The man shrugged. “Sometimes, life hits you in the face with things that you wouldn’t expect.”

San couldn’t have agreed more. In his case, it had been cursed fists.

The man didn’t tell them his name, and he didn’t have to. He handed them a card, one that was too blurry in that moment for San to read. At this point, Wooyoung was blacked out on San’s shoulder, relying completely on San’s narrow frame, but for some reason, Wooyoung’s weight didn’t feel like much at all.

“Wait,” San said once the card was tucked away in his pocket. He stared at the stick of death in the man’s hand as it neared its end. “What… what does smoking feel like?”

Redhead raised his eyebrow at him, smirked, and answered, “It’s one of the most liberating things for someone in pain.”

-

With Wooyoung barely conscious, San practically had to drag him several blocks until they reached the bridge, the one that they’d crossed over into that weird, dingy part of town that San had no idea existed. His vitality was beginning to return, and Wooyoung’s did too, after he’d bent over the railing of the bridge and hurled his guts up. San glanced around, barely remembering how they got there in the first place as he rubbed Wooyoung’s back.

He wasn’t surprised Wooyoung ended up this way. He’d drunk significantly more than San, and, according to him, it was only his second time drinking.

Though the bridge was lit, it seemed empty. Zero cars passed by even though the two were there for what seemed like hours as Wooyoung tried to gather his bearings. He’d thrown up twice, both times over the railing while San patted his back.

“You’re not drinking ever again,” San told him as Wooyoung came back down again, collapsing on his rear and back falling against the rail. San crouched beside him.

Wooyoung spit off to the other side and wiped his mouth. “Please, San. I’m used to this.”

It was a voice that San barely recognized. It wasn’t the timid, shriveled tone San was used to hearing from Wooyoung. It was cold, frigid like winter days, and Wooyoung didn’t once look at him.

It confused San. How could Wooyoung be ‘used to this’ if it was only his second time drinking?

Somehow, the both of them got home mostly unscathed. Wooyoung had texted San, telling him that he was showered and going to bed and would probably wake up with an excruciating hangover, but he assured him that he’d be okay. San didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he had his own thoughts to attend to.

He stood still in the shower as flashes of ruby and emerald, a single light, and the scent of death replayed through his mind.

That night, he wrote:

_How can I make the pain stop?_

-

San learned Hongjoong’s name over the summer when he’d traveled across the bridge back to the shady side of town in search of the answer to his question. Out of all places, San hadn’t expected to run into the redhead at the convenience store attached to some dilapidated brick building that stood out just as much as the prostitute did.

An electronic bell pealed as San pushed through the glass that was covered in tattered old signs and was greeted with an overly chirpy, “Hello!”

It took a few moments for San’s now sober brain to remember the face, but there was no mistaking it. Though his makeup was much less tacky than before, it was undeniably him. “Oh, it’s you!”

“Y-Yeah.”

“Do you even remember me? You were pretty drunk that night.”

“Kinda, yeah.” It was half true. San remembered most of it. “Did we ever get your name?”

“It was on the card I gave you.”

The card, which was still tucked away in his jacket’s pocket, indeed read the name ‘Hongjoong’s Escort Servicing.’ San frowned when he read it. “Why did you give this to us?”

Hongjoong shrugged. “Just in case, I guess.”

Baffled, San shook any potential legal trouble out of his head and instead honed in on the shelves behind Hongjoong’s head.

Were those truly the answer to his question?

“Are you looking to buy cigarettes?” Hongjoong questioned with a quirked eyebrow.

“Y-Yeah.”

And as if Hongjoong _knew_ , he grabbed a random brand and placed it on the counter. “May I see your I.D.?”

Frowning, San pulled out the only I.D. he had, being his student I.D. He knew that it wouldn’t get him the cigarettes, not by a landslide, but Hongjoong examined it for about five seconds with a grin on his face. “You’re good.”

“What?” San gawked at him, clearly taken aback. “I am?”

Hongjoong chuckled and slid the pack to San, white and garnished with red and green outlines, just like him. “Please, sweetie. You look like you need them. Besides, I run the place, and I say you’re clear. Would you like a lighter as well?”

“Uh, um, s-sure,” San stammered, staring at Hongjoong in disbelief as he retrieved a solid green lighter. “Why are you—”

“Consider them gifts from me,” Hongjoong said. “No charge today. Tell me, have you smoked before?”

“N-No,” San answered honestly.

Glancing over San’s shoulder, Hongjoong grabbed the cigarettes and the lighter and stepped out from behind the counter, beckoning San to follow him out the front door. The block was eerily barren, but at least that meant nobody would see them.

“I’m going to show you how to smoke,” Hongjoong said, tearing the plastic off the pack. “Have you at least flicked a lighter before?”

“Yeah, I have.”

“So at least you know that. Here.” Hongjoong took out two cigarettes and handed one to San. “Watch.”

The redhead stuck the orange end between his lips, cupped his hand around it, and flicked the lighter to life, holding the flame to the white end. Within a few seconds, the white began to burn, a thin trail of smoke emitting from the end as the ashes burned orange, and Hongjoong breathed in, hollowed cheeks and all. He breathed out, the smoke disappearing into the summer air.

Somehow, San found the scent to be comforting.

“You’re probably going to cough your brains out since it’s your first time,” Hongjoong said, handing the lighter over. “But start slow. That’s how addictions start, anyway.”

And yes, San did cough his brains out as soon as the smoke hit his lungs. The smoke did not come out smoothly like Hongjoong’s did, but it was to be expected. With tears burning in his eyes, he blinked them away just like he did any others, and took another puff. He coughed again, but not as much. It hurt, it really did, but so did everything else.

San was ready for it to end.

So with stars floating around in his head and an infinite amount of questions, he steeled his body and inhaled for a third time. He constricted his throat, blurred his own vision, and refused to cough.

“You’re a natural,” Hongjoong commented with a laugh.

“These things kill, right?” San asked.

There was an uncanny pause, but not once did Hongjoong stop smirking. “Of course they do. Remind me, what’s your name?”

“It’s San.”

“Ah, yes. Well, it’s nice to meet you, San. I’m Hongjoong.”

The two stood there, taking occasional puffs from their cigarettes, and by the time they were snuffed out, San’s head was positively spinning. Hongjoong took him back inside for some water, and that was where San asked him, “If these things kill, why did you give them to me?”

“Are you trying to accuse me of attempted murder or something?” he replied half jokingly.

“No, I just… I guess what I’m asking is why you gave them to me when I’m not legal. And you gave them to me for _free_.”

Hongjoong contemplated San’s question with an expression that reminded him of Yeosang’s. “How could I deny one’s search for something to end pain?”

His answer took San’s breath away, more than the cigarettes did. He looked at San with knowing green eyes and a constant smirk, like he just _knew._ San never had to say anything.

Like usual, San didn’t return home until late that night, having smoked another cigarette beforehand, and below his second question, he wrote and circled:

_More pain._

-

San expected it; he just didn’t care. His clothes picked up the smoke he surrounded himself with, and inevitably, Wooyoung put two and two together.

“San… why are you smoking?” Even though San smelled like smoke, Wooyoung still rested his hand on his shoulder as they lay together in his bed, the air conditioner on full blast.

“It’ll kill me faster.”

Wooyoung sighed. “San, stop saying things like that. You always say these passively suicidal things, and I don’t know how seriously I should take you.”

“Wooyoung.” San sat up abruptly, leaving Wooyoung staring at him in confusion. “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be dead?”

San could see the way Wooyoung’s shoulders sagged, his face instantly falling. “I… well, doesn’t everyone wonder that?”

“Yes or no, Wooyoung.”

“Then yes, San, I _have_ wondered what it’s like to be dead. Why are you asking me this?”

“Have you ever _wanted_ to die?”

Wooyoung’s shoulder rise this time with an apprehensive breath, mouth falling agape, flabbergasted at San’s words. San then realized that even in these several years of friendships, he’d never once told Wooyoung about his thoughts. The things that his brain tried so hard to shove away, but never could. The things that formidably shaped San into the way he was now, an anomaly, an enigma that he himself couldn’t understand.

He’d wanted to avoid bringing Wooyoung into his dangerous world for so long, but maybe it was inevitable.

“San…”

“Again, yes or no. And I won’t tell anyone if the answer is yes.”

Wooyoung’s face tensed as if he would cry again, but he didn’t. Ever since that one day, San hadn’t seen him cry. “Yes,” he admitted in a whisper. “I have. I still do sometimes.”

“Then you and I are one and the same.”

Several seconds ticked by in humid silence before Wooyoung said, “It sucks, doesn’t it? Being suicidal?”

“Are _you_ suicidal?” San asked.

“I… I don’t think so?” Wooyoung said uncertainly. “I mean, yeah, there are sometimes where I want to die, but I would never actually kill myself.”

San let out a deep breath, realizing Wooyoung’s words were a lot like his thoughts. “But I was asking _you_ , San. Would you… would you ever kill yourself?” Wooyoung asked, voice tiny as ever.

San thought about the words he’d written down in his notebook, the two questions, one with a possible answer, and said, “I think I already am.”

Wooyoung wasn’t stupid. He wasn’t naïve to San’s mannerisms or the way he thought about things. He could read San like the simplest words a picture book. While San never told Wooyoung about the death of stars and how he often thought about wanting to be like one, Wooyoung knew, much like Hongjoong, that there was something wrong with him, and that he wasn’t going to stop.

San felt bad, but at the same time, he didn’t.

He was not going to stop for another thing that will inevitably perish.

Because Wooyoung knew these things, he didn’t tell San to stop. He didn’t cry, but he wrapped his arms around San and held him close, breathing in the smell of cigarettes and sadness, probably wishing that things were different once again.

“Me too,” the small boy said, long after San had said his previous sentence.

San didn’t ask how or why. He simply laid there, holding Wooyoung, who smelled like musk and citrus, and looked at the whiteboard with the numbers on it.

Today, it was fifty-six point nine.

-

San saw Yeosang a few times over the summer, when the cicadas chirped obnoxiously and the sun beat down on the pavement. He’d watch the sunset alone because Wooyoung had family that he actually liked to spend time with, but for a few evenings, Yeosang had joined him. Though the sun was behind them, they watched the pinks and the oranges and the periwinkles, colors that San saw no beauty in anymore. Yeosang had commented that his friend liked sunrises, which San found pretty dumb, but there was probably a reason for it, one that he would probably understand if things were _different._

“I’m sure he would love this spot,” Yeosang said.

In a way, San liked this spot too. Prior to that drunken night with Wooyoung, he had no idea this bridge or this river existed. He didn’t wish for it, just like he didn’t wish to meet Wooyoung or Hongjoong or Yeosang. But it was another _difference_ that he just happened to come across because he had been drunk with Wooyoung.

The bridge looked a lot higher now that he was sober. He wondered when it was built.

“San, what are you doing?” Yeosang had asked when San took out a cigarette and his forest green lighter.

“I’m dying,” San answered flatly as he lit the end. He would have to go back to see Hongjoong again for some more soon.

“We all are,” Yeosang said, “but you’re not legal to drink or smoke yet. How did you even get your hands on those?”

San shrugged. “I have ways.”

Yeosang scoffed and fixed his gaze back out on the water. “You confuse me a lot.”

“I’m not that complicated, Yeosang.” San took an enormous breath in and felt the smoke swirling in his lungs, a dense fog of death, before exhaling. Yeosang watched him in disgust. “This river leads to the ocean. The Pacific, I’d assume.”

“Probably, yeah.”

“How many mountains do you think are buried down there?”

“The Earth is billions of years old and ninety-five percent of the oceans are unexplored. I’d assume there are a lot.”

“Even the strongest things have an end.”

“Who said mountains are strong?”

San turned to face Yeosang, cigarette stuck between his lips. “You yourself said ‘the ability to move along’ makes something strong, didn’t you?”

“You asked me what makes some _one_ strong, not some _thing_ ,” Yeosang pointed out, returning an equally unamused look.

“You’re such a stickler for details.”

“And you’re going to slowly kill yourself with those.” Yeosang pointed at the cigarette.

San sighed out another few wisps of smoke. The sky was gray now, just like the matter in his defected brain. “Yes, everything has an end,” Yeosang continued, resting his arms on the railing. “Humans, mountains, and one day, the sun with cease to exist as well. It makes me wonder if the universe will end as well.”

“A lot of things are uncertain,” San added. “Like what happens after death. Does it really end there? Or… do we move along?”

“Are you implying something, San?” Yeosang asked with what seemed like a high level of concern.

San laughed internally. Knowing Yeosang, he wouldn’t say anything even if he knew something was wrong. Yeosang was a good guy. He entertained existential questions, yes, but never suicidal ones. Never the bad ones. If Yeosang wasn’t good, he was neutral.

“Two things that I am certain are uncertain,” San said, “are what happens after death and the fate of the universe.”

“You seem to think about death a lot,” Yeosang noted.

San chuckled then, lungs protesting slightly, but he swallowed it down, just like everything else. Every ounce of pain, he swallowed. He made sure he wouldn’t speak of it. He made sure he wouldn’t _feel_ it.

“That cigarette of yours has an end, too,” Yeosang said.

And surely enough, San had to snuff it out with his foot because it would burn him if he didn’t. Not that he would mind all that much, though.

That night, he wrote:

_Will the universe die just like everything else?_

-

“I get it,” Wooyoung said to San one night.

It was nearing San’s time to go home. At nearly two in the morning, the full moon was out and glaring down at the two of them, probably scowling. San smelled like smoke. He wondered if Wooyoung was starting to smell like him too.

“Get what?”

“Why you do it.”

San didn’t have to ask what ‘it’ meant. “Yeah?”

“You want the pain to stop.”

San swallowed. The pain was lodged in his throat, and he didn’t want to retrieve it. Not here, not now. “I-I’ve never smoked, and I don’t want to. But everyone has something they do to make the pain stop, even if it’s just temporary. And… if this is your way to make it stop, then I understand.”

Wooyoung didn’t look too sure of himself, but San knew he would never voice that.

“What do you do to make it stop, then?” San asked him.

“I flush it out.”

San looked at him expressionlessly, and Wooyoung looked at him the same way. By now, the two had fallen on the same wavelength where they didn’t even have to say anything. If San could read his mind, he wouldn’t have to do that either.

He looked over at the whiteboard. Today was fifty-eight.

-

There were multiple days in San’s lifetime where he felt like he’d had enough, but he never did anything about it. Not a single day passed where he didn’t think about telling his mother, doing something about what his father had turned him to, the _abomination_ he’d become, but something told him they already knew. They _knew_ , just like Wooyoung and Hongjoong and Yeosang. It was really obvious, especially upon returning to school, that San was not right.

He saw the way people looked at him. After all, he used to smell like lemon-scented body wash and now he smelled like suicidality and lung cancer.

He didn’t care. He was long past the point of caring.

He was an abomination. A disgrace. But he’d figured that out a long time ago; he didn’t need anybody else to tell it to him. Of course, none of his peers ever said anything to him, and neither did his teachers, who spared him questioning glances and frowns because how dare he show up to class smelling like he didn’t want to be alive.

He was supposed to be _grateful._ He was learning. He was reading and writing, things that not everybody in the world could do.

And still, the pain was clinging to the fleshy walls of his esophagus. It wouldn’t leave anytime soon, even if he imagined several bodies piling up and children dying of hunger. Those people who move along despite _real_ challenges were to be celebrated and honored. Not people like him, raised on privilege and technology, who hurt despite the fact that _it could be worse._

San _tried_ to look at it that way. He really did. But maybe he was born with it, a truly fatal flaw from the beginning. That pain was meant to reside within him, shoved away in absolutely any part of his body because he refused to let it leave his mouth.

If he did, he would be called ungrateful. But he was aware of that too.

He was privileged. He was ungrateful. He shouldn’t be in pain.

It never stopped.

San wasn’t falling in a downward spiral; he was stuck in one, a constant tornado at a standstill, throwing him in an endless circle of privilege and pain and guilt, and it wouldn’t let him drop. It wouldn’t stop knocking him around like his father, and it wouldn’t stop at all because the universe didn’t want it to. So the tornado spun on its tail and shook San to the core, made the mountain he was supposed to be crumble, and somehow, his heart was still beating.

He wondered what it would take to make the vortex stop completely, but he was still searching for that answer.

San never knew what happiness was, but he assumed it was supposed to feel _good._ No answer San came up with felt good in any sense.

He stared at the three questions in his notebook, one with an a circled answer, and wondered if there were any answers that would make him ‘happy,’ whatever that was supposed to feel like.

He crossed out the answer to his second question and wrote three more.

_What does happiness feel like?_

_How do I escape this tornado?_

_What are the answers to my previous questions?_

He was about to add _ones that will make me happy_ to his final question, but then he remembered Yeosang telling him that if the answers didn’t make him happy, then they weren’t the answers.

He just hoped Yeosang was right in some way, even if he couldn’t see it.

-

Wooyoung wasn’t eating, and San wasn’t stupid. Neither of them were.

San didn’t care about a lot of things, but he certainly cared about Wooyoung.

He continued to get cigarettes from Hongjoong with money that he’d never used growing up. Back when he got allowance for doing small house chores or when he’d see his extended family and they’d give him money toward his college fund or whatever. Now, San was spending that money on things that would kill him. How funny.

Wooyoung continued to go to school without bringing lunch. In his bag, he would carry makeup instead.

San would never judge him for it. He cared too much about Wooyoung and cared about absolutely nothing else, so he really didn’t give a fuck when he saw Wooyoung concealing the bags under his eyes. Wooyoug knew San wouldn’t judge him, so he just kept on doing it.

Wooyoung was tired. San always knew that. Wooyoung was tired just like he was, even though San never knew the reason why. Perhaps Wooyoung didn’t know why San was so tired either, but maybe it didn’t need to be said.

It was that wavelength of theirs, one that they kept riding even though it was dangerous because it was _theirs._ They knew it, they were familiar with it, and even though they were exhausted and knew everything and nothing at all, they kept on doing it. They just kept on riding it.

San wasn’t surprised at all when he discovered the whole truth. It had always been there in the shape of a whiteboard, staring him dead in the face whenever he’d spend his late nights with Wooyoung. It was there whenever Wooyoung excused himself after lengthy conversations about existence and pain. It was there whenever Wooyoung didn’t bring lunch to school or buy some of his own. It was there whenever San tried to offer him food and he’d vehemently reject it.

San wasn’t stupid. He was just silent.

-

The five parts to a plot: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution.

San wondered what part he was in when he came home at two in the morning and was immediately swung at. It took him by surprise. Weary from the smoke and nauseous from the tornado, he didn’t have the reflexes to avoid his father when he grabbed his son by the shirt collar and hurled him against the wall, knocking his head against solid plaster. Through water and blurs, San searched for his mother, who was standing in the doorway to the kitchen, face set in a deep frown as she watched the scene unfold before her.

“I’ve about had enough of you!” his father sneered in his face, breath reeking of dinner that San hadn’t had because he was too busy avoiding _this_. “You smell disgusting! You think we haven’t noticed your shit smelling like smoke?”

His father switched hands, taking San’s collar by his left and using his right to slap him. Somehow, this one hurt most of all.

“Get your fucking life together! I didn’t ask for such a worthless son!”

San wanted to stare his father straight in the eyes and tell him to kill him. He might as well. He helped bring San into this world; he could take him out just as easily.

But at the same time, San wanted to purge himself of all the words accumulating in his throat over so many years, from the nursery rhyme about stars to Wooyoung to the constant thoughts he had about dying. He wanted to scream, _I want to die! That’s why I’m so worthless, isn’t it?_

Because really, that might have been it all along. He could have said it then and there, right in front of his parents who knew next to nothing about why their son was so worthless. Who knew nothing about why San wanted to die so much or that he wanted to die at all. He was so sure already that his father wouldn’t let up, that he would pound him into the ground before he admitted that his son was mentally _wrong._ And he was damn sure that his mother would stand off to the side, just like she always did.

It made San wonder if he ever laid a hand on her like this too.

There were a lot of things San could have said, but he didn’t say the truth. Instead, he fueled his father’s rage and spat back at him, “What the fuck is a broke high schooler supposed to do?”

It was a question that San didn’t want to bother finding an answer for because it really didn’t matter. There was no way San could get his life together. Hell, he could, and it still wouldn’t be enough for his father.

It was so pointless. So goddamn pointless.

San’s head was already pounding from the first blow. It was easy for his father to switch hands again, bunching his shirt collar up in his left, opening the front door with his right, and shove his son outside. He tumbled down three concrete steps as his father shouted, “And don’t you come back, you worthless piece of shit, or I’ll break all of your ribs and then some!”

San heard the faint sound of a door slamming. His face stung, his entire body begging to _stop_ , but all he could really do in that moment was curl up on himself like he did for several nights when the world was too painful to bear and the nightmares haunted him. Except now, his nightmares had come to life.

For the first time in years, San cried.

He cried as his scraped knees led him to his feet. He cried as he dragged one foot in front of the other and texted Wooyoung, _be at your window in a few_ , because he knew Wooyoung was still awake.

Wooyoung greeted him with panicked eyes, widening further as he saw tears. “San, what the hell happened?” he whisper-shouted as San climbed inside.

“Everything and nothing,” San answered, collapsing onto Wooyoung’s bed and letting out a choked sob, praying that Wooyoung’s parents wouldn’t hear and that they wouldn’t do this to Wooyoung. “They kicked me out.”

“Oh, San…”

San vividly remembered the day he saw Wooyoung cry. He swore to himself that he wouldn’t bring any more bruises to school because he didn’t want Wooyoung to cry. However, he couldn’t remember the last time _he_ cried, times where he didn’t just tear up and wipe them away. He couldn’t remember the last time he fully sobbed, let the pain escape him in the form of useless tears and violent tremors, because he _refused_ to let the pain leave him.

He should’ve known.

He should’ve known that pain doesn’t just go away. It doesn’t stop, no matter how hard he tried to keep it from escaping. It never left. He could shove it away all he wanted, numb himself with cigarettes and infinite questions, but the pain would always stay.

Even after he was done sobbing and let a terrifying sleep consume him, the pain was still there.

Crying was useless. San always knew this, which might be why he refused to do it, but he couldn’t help it this time.

It was the climax, San realized. It could only be the climax.

-

The pain was omnipresent now.

San could no longer swallow it like a pill. He could no longer conceal the effects it was having on his body, not when he was sobbing in Wooyoung’s arms when he slept there or staring up at the troublesome moon while he laid awake on a park bench. It was taunting him, reminding him, _you’re still here, you’re still alive_ , and he found it so, so ironic, because he was already feeling like a corpse buried beneath layers of dirt, having endured long frosts because he had no other choice.

He slept at Wooyoung’s when he could. When he wanted to. Wooyoung _insisted_ , _begged_ San to stay with him, that they’d find a way for this to work, but San shook his head and told him that he was okay, that he had another friend that he was staying with because he didn’t want Wooyoung to have to bear all of his weight and suffering.

By staying at Wooyoung’s, San was doing everything he was trying to avoid. So when he managed to get Wooyoung to surrender his pleas, he would lie awake on the park bench because sleeping on that wooden thing was impossible, wrapped up in this old brown leather jacket Wooyoung had given him, and wonder why the hell he was still going to school.

He and Wooyoung would skip school together just because everything and nothing mattered and San couldn’t stop crying.

He’d always been invisible. He’d always been distasteful in students’ and teachers’ eyes alike. If he dropped out, stopped going, he was sure nobody would bat an eyelash. And his parents?

San found his chest hurting more than his lungs whenever he thought about them. He wondered why they bothered bringing him into this world if all they were going to end up doing was shove him out the front door. As a child, his mother always warned him that the world is dangerous, that he shouldn’t talk to strangers or go anywhere alone, but he assumed his mother must have abandoned those values a long time ago if she was able to bear witness to her son getting the shit beat out of him by her own husband.

San had to admit to himself that he was scared for the first time in years. Just like his pain, he’d swallowed his fear, and he realized that it had all been for Wooyoung.

He didn’t want to share his pain with Wooyoung. He returned home late at night to avoid his father. He managed to go years without bruises. He didn’t get to see Wooyoung cry for those years. With this seemingly viable plan, he managed to dispel the fear of his father because he thought he could get away with it.

But how could he? He’d still have to return home, to his bed, where his parents lived and owned every right to that house. Of _course_ he couldn’t avoid it.

Maybe San _was_ stupid.

And he certainly felt _very_ stupid when he found himself at the convenience store at eleven at night because it was the only other place he knew of where he could get some form of relief. He didn’t have any money and his phone had sunk to the bottom of the river.

Hongjoong greeted him with the usual, “Sannie!” But his face fell as soon as he saw the pallor and utter exhaustion in San’s eyes, instantly reaching behind him for his beloved pack of cigarettes. “Something happened to you.”

“Yeah, my parents kicked me out.”

Hongjoong let out a deep sigh. San stared at the cigarettes but didn’t take them. “And? Where are you staying?”

San shrugged. Another sigh from Hongjoong. “Are you staying with Wooyoung?”

“Sometimes.”

“And other times?”

San shrugged again. “Darling,” Hongjoong said, grabbing the pack of cigarettes and stepping out from behind the counter. “Come with me.”

San followed because there was nowhere else for him to go.

He followed Hongjoong to an apartment that looked more expensive than his old house. It was simple yet contemporary, with furniture and adornments that looked hardly touched, but San figured Hongjoong had other places to stay sometimes. “Before you run that mouth of yours, yes, this apartment was lent to me by one of my glorious sugar daddies.”

“I wasn’t going to ask,” San lied.

“Like hell you weren’t.”

San chuckled as Hongjoong pulled out two wine glasses and a bottle. He hadn’t gotten drunk since that one night with Wooyoung, the night he’d met Hongjoong, ironically. But he figured, he didn’t have school anymore and there was no point in anything, so why not?

“It hurt, didn’t it?” Hongjoong asked as San’s head spun. “When they kicked you out.”

“Of course it did,” San replied.

Hongjoong nodded, leaning over one of the armrests and retrieving a small plastic bag filled with materials that San had never seen before. However, he could make very educated guesses. “Have you smoked weed before?”

“No.”

“Do you want to? I will only take yes for an answer.”

San chuckled at classic Hongjoong. His lungs were already scarring over anyway. “Yes, sure, whatever other synonyms for yes exist.”

Hongjoong taught San how to roll a joint. He told San, “Help yourself to whatever you need. What’s mine is yours. I would say what’s yours is mine, but it doesn’t look like you have much.”

San didn’t get angry with him because he knew it was true.

The weed helped. A lot.

With both weed and wine in his system, his throat felt clearer than ever. His pain floated above him in the shape of a smokey cloud and gazed down at him with loving eyes. It begged him to stay. It wanted to be with him forever. And San, in his state of mind, accepted it.

“It’s never going to end,” San said.

“You mean the pain?” Hongjoong questioned.

“Yeah.”

A soft crackle from the burning joint sounded like a bell chiming.

“I know,” Hongjoong said. “It will never end, but it can stop, even if just for a little while.”

San nodded, and he understood.

“You’re welcome to stay here whenever. My sugar daddy pays for everything in this place, but he never stops by, so you’ll be safe,” Hongjoong told him, reaching over to the nightstand, opening its drawer, and pulling out a key card. He handed it to San generously. “I’m not going to be like your parents. I’m not going to watch over you like a hawk, especially since I have my own matters to attend to, but you’ll be safe and warm here.”

“It’s cold outside,” San said instantly. His eyes burned. “I slept out there… or, _tried_ to. I couldn’t. I don’t know.”

“Believe me, sweetie. I know.”

San believed him.

-

San never did stop wandering the streets because he wanted to stop being a burden on people who didn’t deserve it.

He didn’t sleep much, but Hongjoong’s bed was better than his other option. And as for Wooyoung, San was sick of wasting his time. Sick of putting him through pain that he didn’t deserve.

He didn’t have much. He had his body and his thoughts and whatever grains of his resolve he had left after the climax of his story. But out of everything, he had that smallest bit of potential, the potential to be good, like Yeosang.

Instead of being a burden on others, he would burden others’ pain along with his own. He would make sure that Wooyoung never felt obligated to make him stay over. Wooyoung had enough on his own plate… or not enough.

So in hopes that Wooyoung would be better off without him, and that Hongjoong wouldn’t get mad at him for sitting around doing nothing, he roamed the empty streets during the day and retreated to Hongjoong’s bed at night, and while he found himself wondering why Hongjoong never stopped in, he felt like he could make an array of assumptions that would probably be true.

Perhaps it was never that way, though.

-

Yeosang was always a good friend. Too good of a person in San’s eyes, but he was grateful. He’d asked Yeosang to put on a ruse for him, to tell Wooyoung that he was staying with him if he ever asked, but Wooyoung didn’t _need_ to ask because Wooyoung wasn’t _stupid._

Neither of them were. And San was sick of being silent.

So he told Wooyoung the truth as soon as he crawled in through his bedroom window at midnight.

“I love you, okay?”

He was crying again, tears that he wished would just stop because he was so tired of them. But he’d gone back to Wooyoung’s because he found that no matter how much he knew he _needed_ to be away from Wooyoung, the magnet would always pull him back. That magnet, San realized, was love. It couldn’t be anything else.

It was Wooyoung who’d welcomed him into his window with open arms. It was Wooyoung who listened to his passively suicidal comments and accepted that he wasn’t going to change. It was Wooyoung who accepted him, _understood_ him, in all of his fucked up-ness, something that his parents were never able to do.

For the first time in years, Wooyoung cried. They both did.

And they held each other through it, Wooyoung mumbling “I love you” over and over into San’s matted hair and letting his tears fall onto the crown of his head. San had his face pressed into Wooyoung’s chest that no longer smelled like musk and citrus. It smelled like nothing, and then San remembered that when someone has familiarized themselves with a scent, surrounded by it all the time, then the scent becomes nothing.

It made him wonder, does Wooyoung smell like smoke too?

Wooyoung tasted like toothpaste and a hint of something sour. San drowned out every single little thing in that moment because all that mattered was Wooyoung, the small boy with a whiteboard that had seemingly meaningless numbers written out on it, numbers that Wooyoung probably hated to look at, but just like San’s cigarettes, perhaps he was addicted to them. He couldn’t go a day without looking at them because it both reminded him of and numbed his pain.

When he flushed his pain out, those numbers served as the reminders.

Through ragged breaths and tears and sweat, San told Wooyoung that he loved him again and again, their pain becoming one, because that was his answer.

This was what happiness felt like, or the closest thing to happiness San could feel. His love, his Wooyoung, was his happiness.

With bare, entangled limbs and not-so-gentle kisses, San understood.

“Why do you hate yourself, Wooyoung?”

Wooyoung traced patterns onto San’s chest and answered, “I was always meant to.”

San kissed him again. “I think I was too.”

Wooyoung chuckled humorlessly. “My grandmother always told me, ‘Wooyoungie, you’re so skinny! You need to eat more!’ And eomma always told me, ‘If you keep eating like that, the girls at school won’t like you!’ Who the hell am I supposed to believe?” His voice cracked. He needed to drink. “I don’t love myself, San, and I never will. I’m telling you right now, you can tell me you love me all you want, but I will never love myself.”

San really, truly understood.

“Does it stop the pain?” he asked. “Even if just for a few moments?”

“Yeah,” Wooyoung said. “It’s shit for my body, I know. But it makes me feel like I’m doing something right for once. When I see the numbers go down, it’s like I’ve accomplished something. Even though the pain continues after… at least I have that temporary relief.”

San was sure Hongjoong would understand too. They were all just looking for something to make the pain stop. San knew nothing about Hongjoong, and even though he could make all the assumptions he wanted, he couldn’t tell for sure what Hongjoong was hiding beneath his fur coat and cigarettes.

“That’s why you smoke,” Wooyoung continued. “You want your pain to stop. You’re slowly killing yourself, and that’s really the only way to make the pain stop for good.”

San let out a deep sigh of relief. Wooyoung really _did_ understand.

“I am too.” Wooyoung reached down and took San’s fingers in his. “I know I’m slowly killing myself by doing this, but I’m too far gone. And I’m sure you feel the same way too.”

“I’ve always wanted to die,” San said as the stars finally answered him.

That was the truth.

Since the day he discovered that stars aren’t what the songs said they were. They weren’t special no matter how hard people tried to make them be, and neither was he. His father may have named him after a mountain, but in no way was that mountain meant to stand robustly and observe the earth from above because it was just a mere mound, a lump of flimsy rubble, knocked over by the weakest gust of wind. It was always meant to fall.

 _He_ was always meant to fall.

“I figured as much,” Wooyoung admitted with a heavy sigh. San wondered how much it hurt. “You’d always kind of skidded around the topic, but I could tell you were suicidal.”

“Is that what it is? Being suicidal?” San wondered out loud. “I’ve never actually tried to kill myself. I just think about dying a lot and want to know what it’s like.”

“That’s still being suicidal, San. And I’m not saying everyone who smokes is suicidal, because that’s not true. But you smoke _because_ you’re suicidal. Smoking… is one of the most insidious ways to die. It takes a long time, and it hurts. But hey, like I said, it offers you relief, right? Who am I to tell you not to escape your pain?”

“Pain never ends,” San said, thinking of Hongjoong. “It just keeps stacking up.”

“Exactly. And I know you won’t listen to me if I tell you to stop, just like I won’t listen to you if you tell me to stop.”

Their pain wouldn’t stop, but neither would they.

“I’m glad we see eye to eye,” San said as the wavelength narrowed.

“We always do. Just… please don’t tell anyone. Please.”

San agreed easily. He loved him, after all.

-

Time started to freeze San just like the cold did.

This particular autumn seemed a lot colder than previous ones, but that was probably because San wasn’t eating much. Hongjoong did have food at his place, as did Wooyoung, but he only ate if the hunger became unbearable. Even then, he would only eat a few morsels because his stomach was freezing over too. Everything hurt. Food wasn’t going to stop him from hurting.

As the days grew colder, San did too.

He rarely saw Hongjoong, but the now navy-haired man would leave him his precious cigarettes on his coffee table whenever San returned. He left his weed stash and rolling papers out for San to help himself. The ashes and the tiny embers were the only thing that warmed him nowadays.

But one night, Hongjoong _did_ come home, surprisingly, holding a bag full of hair dyeing materials and a wicked grin. Knowing that San didn’t care about anything, he took San into his bathroom, sat him down in front of a grandiose mirror, and told him to stay still as he murdered his shaggy hair.

“How are your friends?” Hongjoong asked in an attempt to make idle conversation.

“What friends?”

“Wooyoung and Yeosang.”

Yeosang. San hadn’t heard that name in a long time. He also hadn’t seen Yeosang in a long time; he couldn’t even remember when the last time was.

“Wooyoung is good. I don’t know about Yeosang. I don’t really see him.”

Hongjoong scoffed.

“He looks like shit.”

San immediately frowned, turning to Hongjoong even though he was in the process of brushing chemical burns into his hair. “What? How would you know that?”

“I’ve been seeing him.”

“What? How?”

“We keep in touch.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t have anyone else.”

San felt his frozen heart drop into his stomach. Yeosang, who San had always known to not care about anything, even the company of other people, having nobody else? Why would Yeosang even care about that? Yeosang never cared.

Or, maybe he did.

Yeosang had been the one to tell San to go to him if he ever needed to. He had been the one to wrap San’s injured hand in bandages when he’d squeezed his burning cigarette into the palm of his hand.

Yeosang, who was _good._ How could San forget that?

“Yeosang has had quite the bad luck since you dropped out of the picture,” Hongjoong said indifferently as he picked his strokes back up. “It’s not my place to tell you his troubles, but… he’s hurting. A lot.”

San would be lying if he said he didn’t care.

San didn’t care about a lot of things. He cared about Wooyoung, definitely. He didn’t care all that much about Hongjoong.

But how in the world could he completely forget about Yeosang?

“He’s such a strong person.” Hongjoong sighed dreamily as he parted San’s hair. “I don’t know how he does it. Granted, he’s still fortunate enough to be living under his parents’ roof, but he’s smart. He’s independent. And he’s so, so good.”

San swallowed a frozen lump in his throat. “He is.”

“Glad you realize that, at least,” Hongjoong commented. “Let me ask you this, San. If I were to tell you Yeosang was hurting over you, would you care?”

 _Yes,_ San thought.

“I don’t know,” San lied.

Hongjoong visibly rolled his eyes as he folded the last piece of tin foil over San’s hair. “I know you don’t have many people in your life right now, San,” he said, placing his tools down on the bathroom counter, “but out of everyone you’ve ever known, I’m damn sure Yeosang is the only person who’s ever given a real shit about you. Maybe you should stop taking that for granted.”

He stormed out.

San looked at himself in the mirror, his hair slowly dying just like him, and wondered if that was true and if it even mattered.

-

San was screaming.

He might have had a little too much to smoke. The weed, the cigarettes, and he’d even helped himself to some of Hongjoong’s wine. All of it was mingling inside of his weakened body and eventually traveled to his brain, where it went into overdrive, and he flew into a rage.

Hongjoong stood firmly with his arms crossed, glaring San down as San’s tears threatened to surface again.

This wasn’t him.

San didn’t cry. It was the smoke. It was the alcohol. Not him.

But he was screaming about old thoughts, old things that he thought he’d shoved away a long time ago. Thoughts of dying and stars and wishing that things were different. A jumbled mess as San’s blood tried its best to help him, but nothing could help him. Not in this moment.

In the midst of San’s screaming, Hongjoong’s phone rang. Unbothered, he picked it up, only for his face to do a complete one-eighty as he said, “Yeosangie?”

San stopped screaming.

“Yeosang, what’s wrong? What’s going on?” Hongjoong’s face grew increasingly panicked as San stood and watched, lungs struggling. "Yeosang, I have no idea what you're talking about. Stop being cryptic and tell me what happened."

San watched as Hongjoong gathered his items and made a beeline for the front door. "Yeosang, are you home right now? Don’t you dare hang up on me."

“Hongjoong, what’s—”

The door slammed, and Hongjoong was gone.

Yeosang. What was wrong with Yeosang?

There was another chill in San’s bones. He was _worried_ , another thing that he hadn’t felt in so, so long. It itched his skin and pounded into his lungs as he collapsed back down on the sofa, doing his best to breathe.

-

Wooyoung was dying. San knew this, especially when he noticed that the latest number on the board had dropped to an abysmal fifty-three.

That, and it was hard to hold him now. He wanted to hug him so badly, but he feared that his feeble bones would break. His eyes had sunken in and his body was cold. Even with the comforting heat of his parents’ house, it wasn’t enough to warm either of them. They were just two hollow vessels devoid of any senses or substance.

They were nothing.

Wooyoung couldn’t hold his hand without shaking.

“Wooyoung,” San said, “where are your parents?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s like… they’re never here. I thought you liked spending time with them.”

“I used to,” Wooyoung said. “It’s weird. I barely see them, even though I know they’re home. They don’t bother checking up on me, either. I wonder why, but I guess it doesn’t really matter.”

_It really doesn’t._

“I have you, after all. So nothing else really matters.”

“Wooyoung, _I_ don’t matter,” San said.

“And neither do I. So it all works out.”

San closed his eyes and breathed. The air did nothing to relieve his pain. He wondered what his parents were doing, if they ever missed their son, if his sister even knew about what they’d done. If they ever wanted him back. If his father was still an asshole and if his mother was still an accomplice.

He thought about the notebook he kept in his drawer and if his parents ever discovered it. But just like the questions spilled on the pages, it didn’t matter.

Nothing mattered anymore.

-

The stars had always been cruel to San. This wasn’t an exception.

Faced with his one remaining fear, one that he hadn’t even solidified in his mind yet, he stood on the bridge as Yeosang screamed at him, words of pain and suffering that weren’t supposed to be his. Names that were familiar to San, but not entirely known. Something about a suicide attempt and an abusive father. San tried his best to listen, but the waves of the river were so, so tempting, beckoning him down, flooding his ears.

There were tears in Yeosang’s eyes but none in his own. Yeosang was crying, but it didn’t seem like he realized it.

Yeosang was in so much pain. San had never once seen him quite like this. He’d never imagined that Yeosang, who should have been named San instead of him, would be screaming at him like this, words that were harsh but true, rough around the edges but _caring_ deep down. Yeosang cared about him, and from what San could read, he cared about Wooyoung too.

He wanted both of them to stop killing themselves.

But no matter what, San couldn’t let Yeosang know he still cared. He was hopeless. He needed Yeosang to see that. To forget about him. He needed Yeosang to hate him so much that he would forget about his pain.

And then, San could _let go._

"There's no point," he said, the smile never disappearing from his face. It hurt to keep it up. "There's no point in getting so worked up, Yeosang. I'm not going to change, and neither is Wooyoung. Nothing is going to get better for us. So what's the point in feeling our pain? Sometimes, you just need to learn to _let go_."

The pads of Yeosang’s fingers dug so hard into his frail skin that it hurt. Who knows, it might have left bruises. But he _let go_ , with a slight shove, and said, “You’re unbelievable, San.”

“I just speak the truth.”

San wondered if it really was. He watched as Yeosang disappeared into darkness, back to his home where he would be safe and warm. He smiled, knowing that Yeosang was such a good person, everything that he wished he could be.

He turned on his heels and thought to himself, Yeosang will never know the full truth. The truth was, he was doomed from the start. The stars traced his fate with a tragic pen and cursed him with thoughts of death. They birthed him into a family that ended up wanting nothing to do with him, but again, that was his fate. From the start, nothing mattered. Everything was pointless.

San was no longer afraid.

He thought about his questions and the possible answers, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Nothing ever felt like happiness, not even the hushed kisses he and Wooyoung shared. Not even Wooyoung himself. Not the cigarettes or the fact that he was killing himself with them. He didn’t know what happiness _was_ , so how could he ever come up with answers?

He would never find them. That was the answer.

His fear had drowned the moment Yeosang ran away from him. Finally, the one thing holding him back, the possibility of Yeosang caring about him, was gone. It ran away. It hated him, wanted nothing to do with him, and he understood why. Nobody wanted anything to do with him. _He_ didn’t want anything to do with him.

He returned to Hongjoong’s house to find that the prostitute had returned from his sleazy rendezvous with a glass of wine in his hand and a frown. “Oh, hi, San. I’m surprised that you came back. Figured you’d gone to Wooyoung’s or something.”

San knew Hongjoong held a certain disdain towards Wooyoung for whatever reason, but just like everything else, it didn’t matter. “I wasn’t at Wooyoung’s. I went go to see Yeosang.”

Hongjoong’s frown deepened as he raised an eyebrow. “Yeosang?”

“He called your phone while you were out and I picked up. He actually wanted to talk to me about stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?” Hongjoong stood up, posture rigid and face solemn.

“Stuff that he’d been holding onto for a long time. The things that you said weren’t your place to say.”

“Ah. Then you saw it for yourself, right? How much he’s hurting.”

“Yeah,” San answered. He chuckled at the memory. No, he had not wanted to see Yeosang in pain. But it was his final straw. It was the last thing San needed to do to be done.

And now…

“He told me that Wooyoung needed help because of his eating disorder,” San said with a grin. He could feel it coming. He could feel the waves on his skin already. “But here’s the thing, Hongjoong, I’ve known for a long time. I’ve known all along that Wooyoung is killing himself, but guess what? So am I. You’ve seen it for yourself. He accused me of letting Wooyoung suffer, and while I guess that may be true, it really doesn’t matter. The two of us agreed that we wouldn’t stop because it’s pointless. Everyone… has their own ways of making the pain stop, and who am I to tell Wooyoung that what he’s doing is wrong?”

Hongjoong narrowed his eyes at him, face set in a deep scowl as he stepped forward. “You allowing yourself to suffer is one thing, San. Allowing another human being to suffer is another. You knew very well that Wooyoung… no, you _know_ very well that Wooyoung is killing himself, and you’re letting him.”

“Wooyoung is letting me kill myself too, you know. It’s not just me. It’s the both of us.” He chuckled, blinking away ghost tears.

“And Yeosang? What about him? You’re just going to let him suffer?”

“It’s pointless, Hongjoong!” San exclaimed, throwing his arms out beside him. He let his head fall back and shook it, rattling his brain around. “It’s all fucking pointless! You’re going to blame me for Yeosang’s suffering, fine. I get it. But you know, maybe that’s the push the both of us need. Because Yeosang probably hates my guts now, and I know why. I’ve hated myself for as long as I can remember. I don’t care about what happens to me. And what happens to Yeosang doesn’t matter.”

Hongjoong’s eyes widened. “In the end… none of it matters. Happiness, sadness, pain, death… none of it matters. It never ends,” San said.

Hongjoong was often unreadable. San never knew about Hongjoong’s truest struggles, and he’d given up on making assumptions. As numb as Hongjoong seemed on the surface, San knew that nobody was truly impervious to pain, not him, not Hongjoong. After all, it was pain that drove both of them this far. He learned to expect everything and nothing from Hongjoong.

So when Hongjoong, with a daunting expression, told him to hand over his key, San easily complied.

“Leave,” Hongjoong said. “If you think everything is so pointless, then so is staying here. I wanted to help you, San, I really did. I didn’t want you to end up like me.” He scoffed. “But I had no idea it was possible for someone to be more hopeless than me.”

With a broken breath that felt like water in his lungs, San nodded and left.

-

_One: I was doomed from the start._

_Two: It doesn’t stop._

_Three: It doesn’t matter._

_Four: Nothing._

_Five: Drown it._

_Six: There are none._

-

“Are you scared?”

Wooyoung sounded scared, but San was sure that if he asked him the same question, he would lie and say no.

“I’m terrified.”

“Me too.”

Wooyoung’s hand was cold, but it did not shake.

There was no point in lying anymore.

San looked up. The stars were not there to witness the finale.

Was this the resolution? Had all of his suffering up to this point been the falling action? Or had everything since his birth been the falling action? It was the only conclusion he could draw.

“This is what we were meant to do, right?” Wooyoung asked. He sounded timid, just like he had when San first met him. But over time, as Wooyoung’s body grew weaker, his tenacity grew stronger. He didn’t cry. He became numb.

San closed his eyes and thought about Yeosang. By Yeosang’s definition, they were never strong, but Yeosang sure was.

“It doesn’t matter,” San said. “Wooyoung, you can go. You can turn back.”

“No, San,” Wooyoung affirmed, but there was an undeniable crack in his voice. “I know you’re not going to stop, and neither am I. We always see eye to eye, right? This time is no different.”

San turned to look at him. His cheeks were no longer chubby, and his eyes were ten times as sad. He didn’t smile like he used to because it probably hurt to do so. San knew it hurt for him.

Wooyoung’s hands didn’t shake. His fingers were bony from malnutrition. They were cold, both from lack of sustenance and the oncoming winter, but San still loved them the same. With one hand gripping the railing, the other embracing Wooyoung’s frigid hand took it up to his mouth where he planted a gentle kiss on it. It was dry.

“Remember what I told you?” San asked, glancing down.

Wooyoung nodded. “Let go, then don’t let go. And don’t stop breathing.”

“Don’t stop breathing,” San repeated.

“I understand,” Wooyoung said.

San let out a deep breath that evaporated into the air. All of his tears, the blood in his body, the tragic excuse for a mountain he was, would become one with the Earth that hated him so much. Soon enough, he would truly not matter anymore. Because really, truly, that’s how everyone ends up. He would not become a star with the potential to create new life. Even if he was reborn, it would just end up as another vicious tornado. He would live, and then he would die. It would never stop, and it would never end.

But now, he was able to take control of his own fate. He would let the stars command him no longer. They were gone, and so was he.

For once, he was in control. He wasn’t being held by the shirt collar and smacked across the face. He wasn’t crying even though he was terrified. He wasn’t under anybody’s roof where there was someone besides himself he had to rely on. Here, under the starless sky, San had complete control over his life.

“What would you want to be in your next life, Wooyoung?” San asked.

“Nothing,” Wooyoung answered. “Nothing is important, after all.”

San nodded.

“Let go, Wooyoung.”

“Let go, San.”

And they did. And then they didn’t.

San didn’t know how long his fall was, but then again, he was always falling. He was not something that people wished upon whenever they needed a change. He was not special in any way, even if his parents wanted that for him. He was in a constant landslide, a bottomless one, where he would only continue to fall into an unknown abyss, time and time again. Because it never stopped, and it never ended.

Before their bodies crashed into the water, San realized that because it never stopped, because it never ended, _everyone_ would continue to suffer, whether they knew him or not.

San always wanted to tell himself that he didn’t care. He wanted to die without people missing him or worrying about him. He’d pissed Yeosang off, yes, but there were furious _tears_ in Yeosang’s eyes because he _cared_.

 _“I wanted to understand so badly. I wanted to help, but everyone just kept suffering and I couldn't_ do _a_ _nything. The least I could do was_ try _to understand, but clearly, I don't. All of this pain that I'm feeling, it's pointless, right? I mean, it's not even my own. It's everyone else's. I made it my own."_

Yeosang didn’t hate him. Yeosang was incapable of hating.

So as San’s body fell for those last few seconds, he sent a silent wish to the stars.

_Don’t drown him. Be good to him. Be good, just like he is. Please._

The entire time, San told himself, _don’t stop breathing._

So he didn’t.

And then he did.

**Author's Note:**

> There is hope. Please don't forget that.
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/galaxysangs)


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